Last week I was invited to be a member of the Jury of the Blue-Cloud Hackathon. The Blue-Cloud project is one of the projects promoting the potential of Open Science, as part of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). In other words, the Blue-Cloud project “delivers a collaborative virtual environment to enhance FAIR and Open Science” where marine scientists can use a wide variety of data repositories, tools and computing facilities. The Hackathon invited researchers to “Decode the Ocean” and come with solutions to tackle a selection of Ocean challenges.
Re-use of data
It was very nice to watch an example of “re-use” of data in a, for me, totally new domain. My interest was focused on how the participating teams were managing the data in the “Blue-Cloud” . Whether they cared about FAIRness of data or provenance or authenticity. The Jury evaluated the submissions of the teams on these aspects. Several teams evaluated their own experiences with using the Blue-Cloud data as part of their deliverable. This offered the Blue-Cloud project new insights about the actual use.
Awareness raising
This event was a good example of raising awareness of FAIR and promoting the re-use of data. Several of the resulting solutions were based on data that were collected over a long time and by various disciplines. This combination of data will require curation and shows clearly the need for digital preservation and TRUST– worthy repositories.